Above the Thunder (16 page)

Returning to Rabbit Hill at this point didn't seem right to me; there were still things he had not checked. I began to feel that something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what.

Finally, he said, “Will you tell me why you didn't walk over that strip before we took off?”

I replied, “Oh, hell! I knew I forgot something!”

He waited a few seconds while I was lining up to land at Rabbit Hill, and then he said, “Take me over to Buzzard's Acre.”

Every student at DAT-FAS, whether he had ever been into Buzzard's Acre or not, had nightmares about it. It was a kind of shallow wash that sloped up into the side of a boulder-strewn hill. There was but one way in and one way out. It was steep, full of winding gullies, and studded with rocks and weeds and scrubby bushes. Directly off the lower end was another hillside that the pilot had to contend with both on approach and on departure. Even under the best wind conditions, it was no place to land an airplane, and wind conditions never seemed right. Obviously, a good wind going in was a bad wind coming out, and vice versa. The student couldn't win.

Nevertheless, the circumstances made me glad to be told to go over there. Again I dragged the landing area quite thoroughly, looking for anything I could see that might help me avoid trouble during approach and landing. I got in with surprisingly little trouble and tailed the plane
off among the bushes for concealment from any imaginary enemy strafers. Then I walked that strip from end to end and side to side—a truly necessary procedure in the case of Buzzard's Acre. By the time I said I was ready to go, I knew precisely where my wheels were to run during every foot of my takeoff roll. We got away with no sweat. I had plenty of speed to enable a safe turn away from the hillside ahead, and we started climbing away.

I had barely reached two hundred feet altitude when Captain Baker chopped the throttle and said, “Forced landing!”

As I began my glide, I took a hasty look around for a possible landing place. There was only one, and it was almost directly under me, the worst possible situation with so little altitude. It was a small pasture with a pond, and the only safe place to set down was along a fence to the right of the pond. I turned quickly to my left, and by the time I had completed a 360-degree turn and was again headed into the wind, I was touching down—at just the right point.

As the wheels touched, he opened the throttle and said, “Let's go home to Rabbit Hill.”

Back at the stage field, Baker walked into the hut without a word or a sign to me. Not until next day when I got a slip in my mailbox did I know whether I'd passed or failed the check ride. I passed. Everett Kelley was one of several who got the pink slip that meant failure; however, he was not washed out, but washed back for further training. He eventually graduated and served as a pilot for many years, finishing his career as a civilian helicopter instructor at Fort Wolters.

Now we got our AGF orders and could wear our wings. They asked each of us which way we wanted to go: east or west? I said I wanted to go west.

I said goodbye to Dorie at the bus station in Lawton. Her bus was going to Ohio, mine to El Reno, where I would catch a train. There were floods farther east, trains were late, and I waited more than twelve hours at El Reno before the train came that would take me to Indio, California.

I checked into a hotel in Indio and found there two more pilots who,
like me, were assigned to the 33d Infantry Division Artillery at Camp Roberts. Hal Davis and Bill Brisley had their wives with them, and I joined the group for dinner on a very romantic second floor balcony surrounded by palms. They had already contacted Camp Roberts, twenty-five miles distant, and had been told that trucks would be sent for us the next day, 15 May 1943, to take us to our division, which was some 250 miles away in the Mojave Desert.

Herb Eder, Charles “Speedy” Spendlove, and Dwight Mossman joined us in the trucks that morning and, dressed in our pinks and greens, we rode in the back of a six-by-six truck from Indio through Blythe to Needles and on another forty miles on U.S. Route 66 to where the 33d dwelt in its tent city called Camp Clipper.

It was evening when we arrived. After eating, we were ushered in a group to the tent quarters of the Div Arty commander, Brig. Gen. Alexander G. Paxton. Before us, he had only two pilots: 1st Lt. Fred Hoffman and a Staff Sergeant Anderson. Now, with Lt. Don Vineyard, who had driven his car to Camp Clipper and reported in with us, he suddenly had nine pilots and no aircraft. Anderson, however, had elected to return to the AAF rather than go for an artillery commission, so we were still two short of the full table of organization and equipment (TOE) authorization.

It was significant that Dwight Mossman, a young man of a substantial St. Louis family, was a University of Missouri graduate, as his fellow alumnus, General Paxton, was quick to note. The general assigned Mossman to Div Arty HQ, where Hoffman was already on the roster. Davis and Eder went to the 210th Field Artillery Battalion (FA Bn), Brisley and Spendlove to the 124th, and Vineyard and Kerns to the 122d. At that point, the 123d FA Bn, the 155 mm general support battalion of Div Arty, had no pilots of its own. Much later, it would get George Donaldson and Ellis Pickett.

Hoffman had oiled down a little sand strip near the camp and had a wind sock up. We finally managed to borrow a couple of aged L-3s from the AAF liaison unit at Desert Center, and we started getting a little flying time.

One of our favorite pastimes was made possible by proximity to the
Southern Pacific Railroad. As the trains raced along through the Mojave Desert at speeds roughly equal to our own normal cruise, we entertained ourselves and the train passengers by flying alongside. People would crowd to one side of a car to look at us, then we'd hop over to the other side and they'd come swarming over there, waving and smiling at us. Engineers and firemen would wave and blow the steam whistles for us. And we'd sometimes buzz cars moving on the long stretches of Route 66, until one day someone hit the radio antenna on a jeep that happened to be carrying the division commander, Maj. Gen. John Millikin.

But I guess our favorite of all entertainments was buzzing the nurses' showers late in the afternoon. A few miles from Clipper, near the railroad water point, called Fenner, was a field hospital with a lot of nurses in residence. Regulation latrine screens, which have no tops, concealed their showers from ground observation. Just about sundown every day those showers would be crowded with nurses. As one of our little plan es puttered overhead at about fifty miles per hour, there'd be quite a flur ry of excitement among them. Some nurses would run and grab their clothes and hold them up in front of themselves; some would bend over or squat down, hugging themselves for concealment; but many would simply stand up and wave and smile and, probably, yell at us. And that was as close as any of us ever got to the Fenner nurses, although one pilot whose cap blew off as he leaned out of his plane to shout at them had it returned to him through the message center.

This reminds me of the reason I never had one of those fifty-mission caps that were so talked about among pilots and their fans in those days. Because they often wore earphones over their service caps while flying, AAF pilots were allowed to remove the metal ring that gave form and rigidity to the top of the cap, and it would soon become so broken down and crumpled that a pilot wearing one was easily distinguished from his nonflying fellow officers. Pilots liked that. It was swagger, macho stuff, you know, because pilots invariably believe that there is nothing on earth so valiant and manly as roaring off into the wild blue. Lots of other people used to think so, too. But when we were interviewed in General Paxton's tent that first night at the 33d, I went out and left my service cap in his quarters. Bold, brave, daring young aviator though
I was (in my own mind), I never had the nerve to go back for it. I got along until near the end of the war without one.

The 33d was the first division then in the Desert Training Center to receive its authorized pilots. For that reason, it was tasked to provide a demonstration of organic air observation's capabilities for the benefit of commanders and staffs of other commands in the training center. For reasons I never knew, the 122d FA Bn was chosen to do the job, which meant that Vineyard and I, with the two old L-3s, would be the key figures in the demonstration. A small hill in the desert served as bleach ers for the spectators. Targets were to be selected on the flats and on slopes and in ravines of a small mountain some distance away, the 105 mm howitzers of the 122d firing from behind and a little to the flank of the spectators.

The demonstration went off in fine form, both Vin and I doing our jobs well, the fire direction people and the gunners responding with the speed and accuracy that was to be their norm throughout the war. An Illinois National Guard unit, the 122d FA Bn of World War II remains the best direct support battalion I have ever known. The spectators, most of whom had never before seen what a difference aerial observation can make, must have been favorably impressed.

The demonstration was to end with our landing in the desert just in front of the spectators, where a truck track wound through the creosote shrubs and sand and rocky hardpan. The place was totally unprepared—no one had ever landed there before, and it was just a fresh trail made by the trucks that brought the spectators to the hill. The idea was to show that the organic air sections could “live with the troops” and land “anywhere,” with minimum fuss and bother.

I had the last fire mission, and when I approached the landing site I saw Vineyard's plane already on the ground, just past a sharp bend in the track. He radioed me that it was extremely tricky, with a gusty crosswind that was getting worse by the minute. In the approved manner, I touched down on the main wheels only, holding the tail up so I could see over the nose to follow the ups, downs, bends, and other irregularities of the road, such as bushes the trucks had run over and mashed down. The crosswind kept trying to push me off to the left, so I also held the right wing down as long as I could, keeping directional control with the rudder.

The bend and Vin's plane were coming up very quickly, and I wished the tail would go down so I could use the brakes, but every attempt to bring it down only lifted the wheels off. Finally, when I had about decided I'd have to go around and try again, the tail came down—a bit reluctantly. Just as the tail wheel touched and I came onto the brakes, a sudden hard gust from the right front lifted the plane back into the air and gently set it down just off the trail to the left, where it quickly came to a halt. I shut down, and then I could hear the applause from up on the hill where the assemblage of brass was starting to depart.

My L-3 had a nicked prop and a few small rips in the fabric on the fuselage. I flew it back to Camp Clipper before any repairs were made, so obviously the damage was very minor. Nevertheless, as I went to the officer's mess tent about an hour later, Warrant Officer Rudy Krevolt, our personnel officer, yelled, “Well, here comes old ‘Crash' Kerns.” Everyone laughed, and from that day forward I was known in that outfit as “Crash.” I liked that.

It should not be supposed that we aviators did nothing but fly around and have fun. We got the dirty details usually assigned to second lieutenants, and we took part in the physical conditioning activities of the battalion. When General Paxton heard that the infantry units were doing some horrible thing, his usual response was, “If them infantry baws kin do it, mah baws kin do it, too!” And then this bandy-legged little Mississippi cotton broker would set out to prove it. Thus, we arose every morning at 0400 hours and marched five miles to a “dead man” across the sand road and back again to camp before we had breakfast and began the regular training scheduled for the day.

This daily routine finally ended with a grand promenade of the entire Div Arty from Camp Clipper to Clipper Mountain, up the mountain, and back to camp, forty-six miles in two days. We arose at 0400 as usual, had breakfast, filled one canteen each of water, and set out for the foot of Clipper Mountain, eighteen miles away, where we would be met by mess trucks with water trailers. Plodding across the desert by compass, following no road or trail, under the blazing sun of June, we eked out our precious water to make it last the distance. I had still a couple of swallows left in my quart canteen when we reached the rendezvous point. The trucks had not yet arrived, so we settled down to wait. Lt. Ray Rohr
and I spread our shelter halves over a creosote bush to make shade, and we both went to sleep.

Someone awakened us with the word that the outfit was about to move out to climb the mountain. It was nearly dark, and we could see the troops already starting to trail off toward the rocky, treeless ridges.

“Have the trucks come yet?”

“Mess trucks? Sure, they came and have already gone back to camp. Didn't you two get any supper?”

Supper would have been nice, but water was uppermost in our minds. There was none. Except poor old Rohr and me, everyone in HQ Btry had eaten, revived their dehydrated systems with all the water they could drink, and filled their canteens. The two of us had only about half a cupful each of hot, stale water that had sloshed in our canteens all the way from Camp Clipper. But the water trailers were gone. There would be no more until the morrow. We trudged dejectedly off into the gathering gloom to climb Clipper Mountain.